The privacy issues go far beyond no-knock raids. In many jurisdictions police are routinely dispatched when an ambulance is called. If they have body cameras, they will capture all kinds of intimate things that most people would want to keep private.
FedEx and UPS manage to deliver packages to me by truck without driving over any property without permission. Why is it supposedly so hard for drones to do so without flying over property without permission? Just follow the same route UPS or FedEx would use.
In fact, it should be easier for the drones since they will be allowed over property without permission if they are 350 feet up. FedEx and UPS trucks do not have that option.
that's very Libertarian of you, endorsing even more government regulations. "Cognitive dissonance" in operation?
Uhm...using state authority to enforce private property rights is one of the few things most schools of libertarianism agree is a legitimate use of state power.
I have no objection to the science of GMO. It is the business of GMO that I do not trust.
The difference between conventional hybrids and GMOs is that the the set of plants and animals that can be obtained by the former over any given time frame is a tiny subset of those that can be obtained by the latter. GMO gives food producers a great increase in power, and as a great philosopher once observed, "With great power comes great responsibility". I don't think the current food companies have the necessary responsibility.
With conventional hybrids, they are more limited in what they can do, and it can take longer to achieve a given desired organism. These limitations give us a chance to make sure that they are not misusing their power.
He was charged with 35 years, so you don't know what he would have received. That's what the prosecutor wanted.
The prosecutor wanted somewhere between a couple months or so (the amount they offered for a plea bargain) and a few years (the amount they were going to ask for if it went to trial).
You're a fucking moron. How does "access without authorization" warrant a 35 year sentence?
I can't believe that after all these years there are still people who believe that Swartz faced a 35 year sentence. He did not. The algorithm the DoJ uses to get a number to trumpet in a press release ignores the rules of sentencing, and in all but the simplest of cases gives a wildly inflated number. There are two main factors that the press release algorithm ignores.
First, there is a range of possible sentences for a given crime. Where a particular instance falls on that range depends on the severity of that instance. To get the maximum, you have to have done a lot of damage, be a repeat offender, and so on. The prosecutors in the indictment were not alleging the various factors necessary to push Swartz up to the high end on any of the counts.
For the press release, they do not consider this. So if a crime might result in 1 year for someone who caused under $5k damages, and 10 years for someone who caused over $100k in damages, they will count it as 10 years in the press release, even if they are only alleging that the defendant caused $1k damages.
Second, federal crimes are divided into groups, and when one particular act leads to multiple charges from the same group, you will only be sentenced for one crime from the group even if convicted for all of them.
In the press release, they just add up the maximum sentences for each charge, completely ignoring the grouping.
The author is confused. See this discussion on HN where a lawyer or two explain what is actually going on.
Basically, nothing is changing concerning the substantive requirements for a warrant. All that is changing is which judges can issue a warrant after the police have satisfied all the requirements of the Constitution and of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Suppose a crime took place in district X, using a computer in district Y. Before, the police would have to go to a judge in district Y. After the change, they will be able to go to a judge in district X if and only if something like TOR or VPN was used that prevents them from determining Y.
There are substitutes for consideration. The magic words used to hand wave away a need for traditional consideration are "promissory estoppel" or "detrimental reliance".
I think a bigger problem for the $1000 trick would be that a court might see that as effectively a liquidated damages clause, and find it invalid because it was not chosen as a rough approximation of the actual damages likely to befall the user if Ello started running ads.
What is the difference between selective breeding and genetic modification?... nothing.
Wrong. Genetic modification allows for a greater range of modification in a shorter time than can be achieved with selective breeding.
As Ben Parker wisely noted many years ago, "With great power comes great responsibility". Does our current food industry collectively have the great responsibility to wisely handle the great power of GMO? They have pretty clearly demonstrated that they do not.
The energy argument only applies to brute forcing using irreversible computing. If you compute reversibly you can do any computation in arbitrarily small energy.
He was a cable lobbyist (sort of--he was head of the largest cable trade association, and that association did do lobbying among other things) 30 years ago, when cable was the underdog trying to provide an alternative to the big broadcasters, and there was no such thing as a cable ISP because the public internet did not exist yet.
He worked for the wireless trade group 10 years ago.
Also in there he founded or was a heavy investor in several companies that were more on the content provider side of things, and would be hurt by a lack of net neutrality. There is no evidence that he is any more influenced by his very old (and irrelevant to internet) cable association or his more recent but still old wireless association than by his association with those other companies that were on the content side of things.
Suppose I live in a state with a low sales tax and travel to one with a higher rate. I pay with a credit card, just as I would if I were at home making a payment to an online reseller. Do I get charged my home-state tax rate? NO.
It depends on the states. If you are a resident of Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, American Samoa, Alberta, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, or the Yukon Territory and you are visiting Washington, you are not charged sales tax on tangible personal property, digital goods, and digital codes purchased in Washington if they are for use outside Washington. You show the merchant picture ID that shows your address, and they ring up the sale without sales tax.
I never bought anything from Amazon, simply because they want to charge me the additional 27% VAT of my own country, while on the Internet they should charge none and I'd pay it at the customs when it arrives. If I paid them, would they return the tax money to our government later? I don't think so.
Yes, they would turn the tax money over to your government.
I'm in IT myself, and I know how difficult it is to come up with good test-data for your testing...so what's better than production data?
I'm not saying it is so, but it could very well be that the testers have loaded into it this years candidates, made up some likely result, and run the software to see that it works...
And apparently it did!;)
Yup. Generally people doing election-related software have to test with data that is as similar to what will be in the live election as possible, including names of candidates and parties. See this comment in the HN discussion of this, from a developer of election reporting software that has been used in the US and other countries, for details on why and how this sort of thing can happen.
In fact, this same thing happened in the US in the 2012 Illinois Republican primary. The reporting company providing the data to many news organizations accidentally marked the test feed as live for a couple hours the day before the election, and a couple of TV station websites, which were set up to automatically publish updates from the live feed, published this.
The problem in the present case is that it took place in Azerbaijan, which has a long history of widespread corruption and election fraud. It is quite believable that someone has in fact pre-generated the actual election results, and those accidentally got pushed early.
What about the prosecutor that threatened Mr. Swartz with 30 years in jail for actions that most civilized people think should have been dealt with by the University administration, or maybe by the civil courts. Was it responsible to threaten a person with 30 years in jail for disregarding an EULA?
He wasn't facing anywhere near 30 years. The prosecutors told Swartz that they thought the judge might go as high as 7 years. That was if he went to trail, lost, and the prosecutor's largest damage number was accepted. If he pled guilty, the most he was facing was 6 months. See Orin Kerr's detailed analysis.
Technically a Linux based OS should be called GNU/Linux implying that it is a GNU OS running on top of a Linux kernel.
That's historically not accurate. Here's a cut/paste of a comment of mine from another forum on the matter of naming the system that is commonly called Linux:
Historically, naming rights for an OS go to whoever actually puts together and distributes the complete system. For instance, if a workstation company licensed Unix from AT&T and ported it to their workstation, they got to name that OS whatever they wanted. A couple examples of this were Uniplus+, which was UniSoft's Unix, and 386/ix, which was Interactive System Corporations Unix. Both were Unix systems--they used a Unix kernel and Unix utilities--but that wasn't their names. Half the fun working at a Unix workstation company in the early '80s was thinking of a neat name for your Unix port.:-)
For the complete systems distributed by Canonical, Red Hat, and the like, they are the ones who get to name the operating systems that they distribute. Ubuntu calls their OS the "Ubuntu operating system". Red Hat calls their OS "Red Hat Enterprise Linux".
Yes, they are also GNU systems, but if we want to be historically accurate, the most correct way to view this would be to view "GNU system" and "GNU/Linux" as specifications for a specific Unix-like userspace and for an OS that runs the GNU system on a Linux kernel, respectively. The Ubuntu operating system complies with the GNU system specification and is a GNU/Linux system, but it is named Ubuntu operating system.
The person who did much of the conversion work has commented in the Hacker News discussion of this, and explains why tools like latex2html were not good enough.
HTML works better in this case. PDF is better when you need the formatting to be the same on all the devices, but that is not the case here.
With HTML, the user can adjust the size and have the text reflow, and can separately scale all the math (see the MathJax context menu on any equation to access the math scaling settings).
For instance, the HTML edition is quite usable on even my iPhone, with my poor 50+ year old eyes. For a PDF to be usable on such a device, they would have had to format it in such a way that it would look ridiculous on a desktop system.
I have friends graduating with engineering degrees that have 30k in debt from a STATE SCHOOL. This isn't an Ivy League school, but a state university. How does that compute?
It "computes" BECAUSE they went to a state school. If they had gone to an Ivy League school, they would probably have much less debt, if any.
For most students, a good state school is more expensive than Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and so on. That's because the Ivy League schools (and non-Ivy top private schools like Stanford, Chicago, MIT, Caltech and such) have large endowments per student that generate lots of income that they use to provide generous need-based non-loan aid. At Stanford, for instance, if your family makes under $100k, tuition is waived. Under $60k, and Stanford also waives room and board.
State schools, on the other hand, do not have large endowments per student. If their state has budget problems, one of the first things to go is need-based non-loan aid.
This is probably the oddest thing about American higher education. It is actually possible for someone to legitimately say "I could not afford to send my kids to Cal State Fresno, so I sent them Harvard".
No, the Paperwhite readers (and Kobo Glo) use frontlighting not backlighting. Much less eye-strain, and one research study suggests less disruptive to sleep when used in the evening.
My Kindle Paperwhite is much less disruptive to sleep than my iPad, but it has nothing to do with the lighting. It has to do with the weight. The iPad is heavy enough that falling asleep and dropping it on my face hurts enough to wake me up. The Kindle is light enough that I can take one to the face and keep sleeping.
A leader board shows the TOP competitors. That's the point of a leader board. It is not "cherry picking" to only show the top.
The rounding is not dubious. They are rounding to 10% increments because that is the resolution of the progress bars.
The "percent-10", "percent-50", and so on that the "developer tool" is showing are the classes of the progress bars. There is a style correspond to each in main.css, and that determines the length of the progress bar. The style sheet provides "percent-0", "percent-10",..., "percent-100".
Precedent seems to imply that the resulting object cannot be controlled (e.g. the output of a GPLed program is not GPLed, so why should executing a program on a 3D printer be any different?)
Then how do you explain the decline in the amount of nutrients that has been observed in many US crops since 1950, according to the USDA? Citations for this are given in this comment.
Michael Pollan makes a similar claim in "In Defense of Food" on page 115:
Since the widespread adoption of chemical fertilizers in the 1950s, the nutritional quality of produce in America has declined substantially, according to figures gathered by the USDA, which has tracked the nutrient content of various crops since then. Some researchers blame this decline on the condition of the soil; others cite the tendency of modern plant breeding, which has consistently selected for industrial characteristics such as yield rather than nutritional quality.
More detail is given on page 118.
As mentioned earlier, USDA figures show a decline in the nutrient content of the forty-three crops it has tracked since the 1950s. In one recent analysis, vitamin C declined by 20 percent, iron by 15 percent, riboflavin by 38 percent, calcium by 16 percent. Government figures from England tell a similar story: declines since the fifties of 10 percent or more in levels of iron, zinc, calcium, and selenium across a range of food crops. To put this in more concrete terms, you now have to eat three apples to get the same amount of iron as you would have gotten from a single 1940 apple, and you’d have to eat several more slices of bread to get your recommended daily allowance of zinc than you would have a century ago.
Here are some sources cited for that chapter that sound like they might be relevant to those particular claims:
Davis, Donald R., et al. “Changes in USDA Food Composition Data for 43 Garden Crops, 1950 to 1999.” Journal of the American College of Nutrition. 23.6 (2004): 669–82.
Mayer, Anne-Marie. “Historical Changes in the Mineral Content of Fruits and Vegetables.” British Food Journal. 99.6 (1997): 207–11.
U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). FAOSTAT Statistical Database: “Agriculture/Production/Core Production Data.” Accessed online at http://faostat.fao.org./ USDA Economic Research Service. “Major Trends in U.S. Food Supply, 1909–99.” FoodReview. 23.1 (2000).
White, P.J., and M. R. Broadley. “Historical Variation in the Mineral Composition of Edible Horticultural Products.” Journal of Horticultural Science & Biotechnology. 80.6 (2005): 660–67.
Slashdot Mirror
The privacy issues go far beyond no-knock raids. In many jurisdictions police are routinely dispatched when an ambulance is called. If they have body cameras, they will capture all kinds of intimate things that most people would want to keep private.
FedEx and UPS manage to deliver packages to me by truck without driving over any property without permission. Why is it supposedly so hard for drones to do so without flying over property without permission? Just follow the same route UPS or FedEx would use.
In fact, it should be easier for the drones since they will be allowed over property without permission if they are 350 feet up. FedEx and UPS trucks do not have that option.
that's very Libertarian of you, endorsing even more government regulations. "Cognitive dissonance" in operation?
Uhm...using state authority to enforce private property rights is one of the few things most schools of libertarianism agree is a legitimate use of state power.
I have no objection to the science of GMO. It is the business of GMO that I do not trust.
The difference between conventional hybrids and GMOs is that the the set of plants and animals that can be obtained by the former over any given time frame is a tiny subset of those that can be obtained by the latter. GMO gives food producers a great increase in power, and as a great philosopher once observed, "With great power comes great responsibility". I don't think the current food companies have the necessary responsibility.
With conventional hybrids, they are more limited in what they can do, and it can take longer to achieve a given desired organism. These limitations give us a chance to make sure that they are not misusing their power.
He was charged with 35 years, so you don't know what he would have received. That's what the prosecutor wanted.
The prosecutor wanted somewhere between a couple months or so (the amount they offered for a plea bargain) and a few years (the amount they were going to ask for if it went to trial).
You're a fucking moron. How does "access without authorization" warrant a 35 year sentence?
I can't believe that after all these years there are still people who believe that Swartz faced a 35 year sentence. He did not. The algorithm the DoJ uses to get a number to trumpet in a press release ignores the rules of sentencing, and in all but the simplest of cases gives a wildly inflated number. There are two main factors that the press release algorithm ignores.
First, there is a range of possible sentences for a given crime. Where a particular instance falls on that range depends on the severity of that instance. To get the maximum, you have to have done a lot of damage, be a repeat offender, and so on. The prosecutors in the indictment were not alleging the various factors necessary to push Swartz up to the high end on any of the counts.
For the press release, they do not consider this. So if a crime might result in 1 year for someone who caused under $5k damages, and 10 years for someone who caused over $100k in damages, they will count it as 10 years in the press release, even if they are only alleging that the defendant caused $1k damages.
Second, federal crimes are divided into groups, and when one particular act leads to multiple charges from the same group, you will only be sentenced for one crime from the group even if convicted for all of them.
In the press release, they just add up the maximum sentences for each charge, completely ignoring the grouping.
The author is confused. See this discussion on HN where a lawyer or two explain what is actually going on.
Basically, nothing is changing concerning the substantive requirements for a warrant. All that is changing is which judges can issue a warrant after the police have satisfied all the requirements of the Constitution and of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Suppose a crime took place in district X, using a computer in district Y. Before, the police would have to go to a judge in district Y. After the change, they will be able to go to a judge in district X if and only if something like TOR or VPN was used that prevents them from determining Y.
There are substitutes for consideration. The magic words used to hand wave away a need for traditional consideration are "promissory estoppel" or "detrimental reliance".
I think a bigger problem for the $1000 trick would be that a court might see that as effectively a liquidated damages clause, and find it invalid because it was not chosen as a rough approximation of the actual damages likely to befall the user if Ello started running ads.
What is the difference between selective breeding and genetic modification?... nothing.
Wrong. Genetic modification allows for a greater range of modification in a shorter time than can be achieved with selective breeding.
As Ben Parker wisely noted many years ago, "With great power comes great responsibility". Does our current food industry collectively have the great responsibility to wisely handle the great power of GMO? They have pretty clearly demonstrated that they do not.
He also said, "If you have CDs, MP3s or any other music that could conceivably be converted to MP3s at the office, please bring them in".
The energy argument only applies to brute forcing using irreversible computing. If you compute reversibly you can do any computation in arbitrarily small energy.
He was a cable lobbyist (sort of--he was head of the largest cable trade association, and that association did do lobbying among other things) 30 years ago, when cable was the underdog trying to provide an alternative to the big broadcasters, and there was no such thing as a cable ISP because the public internet did not exist yet.
He worked for the wireless trade group 10 years ago.
Also in there he founded or was a heavy investor in several companies that were more on the content provider side of things, and would be hurt by a lack of net neutrality. There is no evidence that he is any more influenced by his very old (and irrelevant to internet) cable association or his more recent but still old wireless association than by his association with those other companies that were on the content side of things.
Suppose I live in a state with a low sales tax and travel to one with a higher rate. I pay with a credit card, just as I would if I were at home making a payment to an online reseller. Do I get charged my home-state tax rate? NO.
It depends on the states. If you are a resident of Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, American Samoa, Alberta, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, or the Yukon Territory and you are visiting Washington, you are not charged sales tax on tangible personal property, digital goods, and digital codes purchased in Washington if they are for use outside Washington. You show the merchant picture ID that shows your address, and they ring up the sale without sales tax.
I never bought anything from Amazon, simply because they want to charge me the additional 27% VAT of my own country, while on the Internet they should charge none and I'd pay it at the customs when it arrives. If I paid them, would they return the tax money to our government later? I don't think so.
Yes, they would turn the tax money over to your government.
I'm in IT myself, and I know how difficult it is to come up with good test-data for your testing...so what's better than production data?
I'm not saying it is so, but it could very well be that the testers have loaded into it this years candidates, made up some likely result, and run the software to see that it works...
And apparently it did! ;)
Yup. Generally people doing election-related software have to test with data that is as similar to what will be in the live election as possible, including names of candidates and parties. See this comment in the HN discussion of this, from a developer of election reporting software that has been used in the US and other countries, for details on why and how this sort of thing can happen.
In fact, this same thing happened in the US in the 2012 Illinois Republican primary. The reporting company providing the data to many news organizations accidentally marked the test feed as live for a couple hours the day before the election, and a couple of TV station websites, which were set up to automatically publish updates from the live feed, published this.
The problem in the present case is that it took place in Azerbaijan, which has a long history of widespread corruption and election fraud. It is quite believable that someone has in fact pre-generated the actual election results, and those accidentally got pushed early.
What about the prosecutor that threatened Mr. Swartz with 30 years in jail for actions that most civilized people think should have been dealt with by the University administration, or maybe by the civil courts. Was it responsible to threaten a person with 30 years in jail for disregarding an EULA?
He wasn't facing anywhere near 30 years. The prosecutors told Swartz that they thought the judge might go as high as 7 years. That was if he went to trail, lost, and the prosecutor's largest damage number was accepted. If he pled guilty, the most he was facing was 6 months. See Orin Kerr's detailed analysis.
Technically a Linux based OS should be called GNU/Linux implying that it is a GNU OS running on top of a Linux kernel.
That's historically not accurate. Here's a cut/paste of a comment of mine from another forum on the matter of naming the system that is commonly called Linux:
Historically, naming rights for an OS go to whoever actually puts together and distributes the complete system. For instance, if a workstation company licensed Unix from AT&T and ported it to their workstation, they got to name that OS whatever they wanted. A couple examples of this were Uniplus+, which was UniSoft's Unix, and 386/ix, which was Interactive System Corporations Unix. Both were Unix systems--they used a Unix kernel and Unix utilities--but that wasn't their names. Half the fun working at a Unix workstation company in the early '80s was thinking of a neat name for your Unix port. :-)
For the complete systems distributed by Canonical, Red Hat, and the like, they are the ones who get to name the operating systems that they distribute. Ubuntu calls their OS the "Ubuntu operating system". Red Hat calls their OS "Red Hat Enterprise Linux".
Yes, they are also GNU systems, but if we want to be historically accurate, the most correct way to view this would be to view "GNU system" and "GNU/Linux" as specifications for a specific Unix-like userspace and for an OS that runs the GNU system on a Linux kernel, respectively. The Ubuntu operating system complies with the GNU system specification and is a GNU/Linux system, but it is named Ubuntu operating system.
The person who did much of the conversion work has commented in the Hacker News discussion of this, and explains why tools like latex2html were not good enough.
HTML works better in this case. PDF is better when you need the formatting to be the same on all the devices, but that is not the case here.
With HTML, the user can adjust the size and have the text reflow, and can separately scale all the math (see the MathJax context menu on any equation to access the math scaling settings).
For instance, the HTML edition is quite usable on even my iPhone, with my poor 50+ year old eyes. For a PDF to be usable on such a device, they would have had to format it in such a way that it would look ridiculous on a desktop system.
I have friends graduating with engineering degrees that have 30k in debt from a STATE SCHOOL. This isn't an Ivy League school, but a state university. How does that compute?
It "computes" BECAUSE they went to a state school. If they had gone to an Ivy League school, they would probably have much less debt, if any.
For most students, a good state school is more expensive than Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and so on. That's because the Ivy League schools (and non-Ivy top private schools like Stanford, Chicago, MIT, Caltech and such) have large endowments per student that generate lots of income that they use to provide generous need-based non-loan aid. At Stanford, for instance, if your family makes under $100k, tuition is waived. Under $60k, and Stanford also waives room and board.
State schools, on the other hand, do not have large endowments per student. If their state has budget problems, one of the first things to go is need-based non-loan aid.
This is probably the oddest thing about American higher education. It is actually possible for someone to legitimately say "I could not afford to send my kids to Cal State Fresno, so I sent them Harvard".
No, the Paperwhite readers (and Kobo Glo) use frontlighting not backlighting. Much less eye-strain, and one research study suggests less disruptive to sleep when used in the evening.
My Kindle Paperwhite is much less disruptive to sleep than my iPad, but it has nothing to do with the lighting. It has to do with the weight. The iPad is heavy enough that falling asleep and dropping it on my face hurts enough to wake me up. The Kindle is light enough that I can take one to the face and keep sleeping.
A leader board shows the TOP competitors. That's the point of a leader board. It is not "cherry picking" to only show the top.
The rounding is not dubious. They are rounding to 10% increments because that is the resolution of the progress bars.
The "percent-10", "percent-50", and so on that the "developer tool" is showing are the classes of the progress bars. There is a style correspond to each in main.css, and that determines the length of the progress bar. The style sheet provides "percent-0", "percent-10", ..., "percent-100".
Precedent seems to imply that the resulting object cannot be controlled (e.g. the output of a GPLed program is not GPLed, so why should executing a program on a 3D printer be any different?)
What if the program is a quine?
Then how do you explain the decline in the amount of nutrients that has been observed in many US crops since 1950, according to the USDA? Citations for this are given in this comment.
Michael Pollan makes a similar claim in "In Defense of Food" on page 115:
Since the widespread adoption of chemical fertilizers in the 1950s, the nutritional quality of produce in America has declined substantially, according to figures gathered by the USDA, which has tracked the nutrient content of various crops since then. Some researchers blame this decline on the condition of the soil; others cite the tendency of modern plant breeding, which has consistently selected for industrial characteristics such as yield rather than nutritional quality.
More detail is given on page 118.
As mentioned earlier, USDA figures show a decline in the nutrient content of the forty-three crops it has tracked since the 1950s. In one recent analysis, vitamin C declined by 20 percent, iron by 15 percent, riboflavin by 38 percent, calcium by 16 percent. Government figures from England tell a similar story: declines since the fifties of 10 percent or more in levels of iron, zinc, calcium, and selenium across a range of food crops. To put this in more concrete terms, you now have to eat three apples to get the same amount of iron as you would have gotten from a single 1940 apple, and you’d have to eat several more slices of bread to get your recommended daily allowance of zinc than you would have a century ago.
Here are some sources cited for that chapter that sound like they might be relevant to those particular claims: